“A Liberal’s Conservative” for the NYT

Selected bits from Michael Calderone’s profile of Ross Douthat, soon to join the New York Times op-ed page:

Micheal Barbaro, a Times City Hall reporter and a former classmate of Douthat’s at Hamden Hall Country Day School in Connecticut, “said Douthat was always on an accelerated path, and recalled that the two of them chewed over the Times each day in the library. ‘When we were in high school,’ Barbaro said, ‘this was our dream.’”

Atlantic blogger Megan McArdle says of her former colleague: “’I think that Ross is a liberal’s conservative,’ adding that he takes opposing thinkers seriously despite disagreeing.”

Calderone also quotes Katha Pollitt, who wrote in a recent Nationcolumn that while “liberal blogger men are thrilled” with the Douthat hire, she is not because “even for a blogo-pundit, Douthat seems unusually averse to engaging with women intellectually, even on perennial topics like abortion and birth control, where you’d think we’d bring something missing to the table—like an interest in our health, well-being, happiness, longevity, pleasure and ability to have some control over our lives.”

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